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Craigslist is great, you just have to use your senses. Only do local deal. No matter what. Complete your transaction at the buyers bank, sign over the title and get the cashiers check from the bank, or cash (at a meeting place, or the title agency). Anything other than these 2 scenarios, is bad. Also get a bill of sale, signed and dated by both parties when the guy drives the car away, so it is no longer your responsibility. A lowish milage toyota (before scandal years) will sell itself. You shouldn't have problems. And yes carmax will buy it, but give you substantially less than you could get for it selling it yourself. I have bought and sold several cars on craigslist with no problems. Just gotta weed out the scammers.
There are some that will sell your car on consignment... ..
Yes, and set a reserve or minimum that you can live with. In other words they can't sell it for less than $x,xxx.
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Originally Posted by car54
Ahem, Carmax IS a dealer...
True.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gbugmiami
Craigslist is great, you just have to use your senses. Only do local deal. No matter what. Complete your transaction at the buyers bank, sign over the title and get the cashiers check from the bank, or cash (at a meeting place, or the title agency). Anything other than these 2 scenarios, is bad. Also get a bill of sale, signed and dated by both parties when the guy drives the car away, so it is no longer your responsibility. A lowish milage toyota (before scandal years) will sell itself. You shouldn't have problems. And yes carmax will buy it, but give you substantially less than you could get for it selling it yourself. I have bought and sold several cars on craigslist with no problems. Just gotta weed out the scammers.
Some states have a form you can fill out to notify the state when you sell a car. Usually through whatever department handles registration. Establishes a paper trail and cut off date of when you are no longer responsible for what happens with that car.
A bit of advise on Craigslist, use a throwaway email address (web-mail) as you will be getting lots of spammers and scammers replying. After the sale you can bail that web-mail address. I just put my phone number on my ads and say on the ad not to reply to the anonymized email link and I rarely put a web-mail address on the ad unless I'm in the mood to play with a scammer.
Craigslist is great, you just have to use your senses. Only do local deal. No matter what.
I've bought and sold cars on Craigslist long distance. For example, my Range Rover was bought from a Craigslist ad on Long Island, NY, and I'm down here in Baltimore. When I do a craigslist search, I'll use the entire mid-atlantic region, including NJ and PA.
I also don't buy appliance cars so I have to cast a wider net to find a car I want. And of course, when I sell unique cars, I have to sell in a wider region, as well.
When selling a popular, common car, yeah, you shouldn't have to go outside your local area. But it's easier to just use your senses when dealing with replies. Anything that's a "do you still have the item" (using "item" instead of car, or sometimes using "vehicle" instead) is a clear sign of trouble.
A note on car dealers - they all go buy the wholesale market for pricing, and none will give you more than wholesale value for your car (not KBB, NADA, etc). CarMax does however seem to give you closer to max value than "normal" car dealerships and is the one I would recommend - part of the no haggle policy I guess. Remember, to a dealer, its not just what your car is worth, its what they can buy that type of car for anywhere, so you are competing with all similar cars nationwide to an extent.
When I have traded in cars in the past, I always start at CarMax and get a value printed out from them. I then use that when trading in the car to get the value I want from it from the dealership I'm working with. If I ever couldn't, I'd just sell the car to CarMax.
Just as an extra place to check, Autotrader now has a guaranteed buy/trade value offer on its site. You enter all the information about the car and they will generate an offer from several area dealers. Most of them only accept trades, but some do offer an outright purchase. You then take the car there to get inspected and as long as you were honest in your statements, they'll cut you a check on the spot.
I would still lean towards a private sale with this car as you don't have to deal with pay-offs and there doesn't appear to be a time constraint on selling it. A dealer can only pay enough to give themselves a profit when they sell it. Let's say the car could retail for $2,000. Chances are the dealer would only offer you something like $1,000. In a private sale you could probably easily sell it for something like $1,800. Generally the sweet spot for a private sale on a common car is an amount slightly less than what someone could buy it from a dealer for.
At least some dealers will sell your car on consignment if you don't want to do your own "leg work" - they take a fixed % of the selling price or they take a fixed fee for doing the deal for you.
Do used car dealers buy vehicles from private sales? I'm going to be selling a 2003 Toyota Camry that has 52K miles on it. Rather than go through the hassle of a private sale, I wondered if it would be useful to contact used car dealerships in our area to see if they'd be interested in purchasing the car?
Back to the original idea here, some dealers do buy. Eight model years is getting old, the mileage is great though. Here most wouldn't buy.
My daughter bought a new Kia this summer, was offered $500-$1000 for her 03 Hyundai on trade, everywhere. We sat it in the driveway with a "For Sale" sign on the dash. It sold in a couple of days for $3500, we had to get the mechanical up to this area's standard, that was $500. The purchaser paid in 20 dollar bills so no trouble.
Great replies, thank you all. CarMax probably won't work as the closest one is in Hartford CT (we're on Cape Cod). We'll most likely just sell it privately and request only a bank check or cash upon transfer.
Again, thank you all for taking the time to answer. I just knew I'd get some good information.
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